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13. Winston Churchill Was the Son of a Dollar Princess
Consuelo endured a mercenary marriage to a man that she found to be cold, distant, and snobbish. She wasn’t the only one; Jennie Jerome, whose marriage helped spark the trend, was covered in tattoos when Lord Randolph Churchill presented her to his parents and announced their engagement. They had only known each other for three days, and his parents were horrified that he would want to marry an American socialite instead of a British noblewoman. Then they realized that her dowry was enormous – over four million dollars in today’s money – and begrudgingly approved of the marriage.
The couple married in 1874, and the new Lady Randolph Churchill gave birth to a son that she named Winston. That’s right, the man who led Britain against the Nazis during World War II was half-American. The privileged aristocracy that he was born into probably helped his political rise, and his American heritage helped him garner support on both sides of the Atlantic. In fact, quite a few influential characters in twentieth-century British history were the children of dollar princesses. Meanwhile, her husband’s parents helped to spark a trend of the aristocracy reclaiming their wealth by marrying wealthy American girls whose parents were keen to gain entry into the most exclusive social club of them all.